Effective management and organization of electronic documents is important In environments where multiple types of documents are created at different times and reside at different locations, keeping track of these documents is difficult. As documents are created, modified, and transferred among multiple users and locations, it becomes important to provide a user with the capability to browse and access document in different points in space and time.
Several attempts have been made to organize documents based on time. Timefinder, by Hochleiser and Shneiderman, University of Maryland, College Park, Md., uses timeboxes to pose queries over a set of entities with one or more time varying attributes. Entities have one or more static attributes, and one or more time-varying attributes, with the number of time points and the definition of those points being the same for every entity in a given data set. If there are multiple time-varying attributes, any one of them can be selected for querying, through a drop-down menu which specifies the dynamic attribute being queried. All active queries refer to the same attribute.
Once a data set is loaded, entities in the data set are displayed in a window in the upper left hand corner of the application. Each entity is labeled with its name and is plotted on a graph. Additional details regarding the entity can be displayed in an upper right hand window by selecting the entity. A user may specify a query by drawing a timebox in a desired location in a bottom left window. Once a query is completed, the upper windows will display information related to the users query. Thus, a user may get time based information on an entity at a particular time by making a query regarding that entity.
Time Tube, by Chi et al, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., discloses a method for visualizing the World Wide Web. Disk trees represent a discrete time slice of the web ecology. A disk tree uses a circular layout to visualize a hierarchy, where successive layers of circles represent levels in a tree. Treelinks, page access frequency and page lifecycle stages are represented by different colors or lines. A collection of disk trees forms a Time Tube. The Time Tube represents the evolution of web sites by displaying, along a time line, a series of disk trees that represent the hyperlink structure of a particular site.
Lifestreams, by Freeman and Gelernter, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., is a way organizing documents created by one user. All documents created by a user using the interface become part of a time ordered one dimensional stream of documents. The stream of documents may be displayed as several overlapping documents having different time attributes. Color is used to indicate an aspect of a particular document, such as whether or not it the document has been read. Substreams of documents can also be created as the result of a search for documents with a certain characteristic, such as format or content.
Time Machine Computing, by Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc, Tokyo, Japan, provides as system that stores the state and content of a desktop. A user may then go back and forth between different times and different corresponding desktops. While at a archived desktop state, the user may double-click on documents and applications that appear on the particular desktop snapshot. A time line view allows desktop items to be viewed as horizontal lines representing time. The beginning of line indicates a creation date, and an end of a line indicates a deletion date.
The systems of the prior art have several disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that none of these previous systems provide a way for browsing and accessing a document at different points in real space and time. What is needed is a system that overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art.